What would another Trump administration look like? As horrible as many find the prospect, it’s a topic that executives are beginning to have to grapple with. For reasons that range from inflation to the conflict in Gaza to Biden’s age, the current administration’s deft handling of a recession, a pandemic and war in Ukraine isn’t being reflected in polls. Many of them put Donald Trump back in the White House in 2024.Despite any number of criminal charges against the former president, it seems a foregone conclusion that Trump will be the Republican nominee. Still, major donors like the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity Action are piling into Nikki Haley’s campaign, which shows how worried the business community is about the possibility of Trump, round 2.

For starters, executives fear which Trump they will get should he be re-elected next November. Will it be laissez-faire Trump, or America First Trump? Back in 2016, Trump talked tough about Made in America and helping working people, but most of his politics (aside from tariffs on China) were basically business as usual. He rolled back regulation and lowered taxes on big corporations. Much of the money went to stock buybacks not Main Street investment.

That buoyed short-term stock prices, which were also helped along by low interest rates. But it’s unlikely we would see the same phenomenon in a second Trump administration. His tenure marked the apex of financialised growth, which is now largely tapped out. As the Fed’s End of an Era paper from June 2023 laid out, about 50 per cent of real corporate profit growth between 1984 and 2020 came from the secular fall in interest rates, and corporate tax rates being cut. That’s what has propelled so much growth in equities in recent years.